


to handle the heat

by aimerai, everyperfectsummer



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce, PIERCE Tamora - Works
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Baking, Character Study, Gen, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes, YouTube
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-07-10 15:50:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19908262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimerai/pseuds/aimerai, https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyperfectsummer/pseuds/everyperfectsummer
Summary: Tris still refuses to show herself in front of the camera. She still sticks to her hands and her voice, to the way she crafts the short paragraphs that introduce each of Briar’s recipes. She’s good at this like she is at the weather, but so many people don’t want to believe in her mathematical models, never mind that she studied under some of the best. She’s good at storms, but she’s still too delicate to be a stormchaser. She stays close to home now, and doesn’t let anyone look at her face. She knows what she is; she’ll never be pretty or striking or beautiful like the people she lives with, but her mind is sharp as a tack and she wields her words with precision.





	to handle the heat

_[You can find the podfic[here](http://www.mediafire.com/file/glmuq93rve2c47h/to_handle_the_heat.mp3/file) on mediafire!]_

1.

“What’s wrong?” Tris asks. 

Briar has changed a lot since she first met him. She knows that he cooks at least a little bit for other reasons, but most of it is him trying to get some kind of control. He doesn’t talk about it much, but she knows he used to go hungry, the two of them thinking about things differently from Sandry, who never had to worry about anything for the longest time. Briar talks about the rest of it, the gangs and the violence that was natural for him, once he’d been turned out on the street. He only hints about the hunger. So now he cooks, and when he’s feeling indulgent, he bakes. Rosethorn doesn’t frighten her anymore the way she first did when Tris came to this foster home, but Briar is still both their favourites, a sort of silent compromise settled around watching him. Even if the idea of vlogging his cooking came from Lark, Tris has no doubts that Rosethorn is behind it somehow, a favour for her favourite. 

Tris sits with him when he’s in the kitchen, grabs a book and stays from setup to clean up. It means his viewers know her voice and her hands, because she’ll hand him things or talk to him, and he never cuts her out. He could, but he never does, and that means something, too, all these videos on Briar’s page where he calls her Coppercurls and asks her to taste this please? 

She doesn’t mind handing him things and tasting and looking up recipes that he might like to try. Sometimes she’ll suggest variations. The best moments are when the two of them sit and commiserate over the wastefulness in so many recipes. The point is that the people who follow him know Tris as a voice in Briar’s videos rather than a story that he tells. She’s the most real sister, for them.

“Briar?” Tris asks. He’s been staring down at his bowl of dough for a lot longer than usual. Sometimes it happens, but usually Briar can snap himself out of it. “Is something up?”

Briar blinks. He’d stopped stirring it at some point, the wooden spoon hanging limply from his hand. He shrugs. 

Tris snaps her book shut quietly. She comes around to the other side of the counter and pauses the camera so it’s no longer recording. “Briar?”

“Sometimes, I feel bad about it,” Briar says, staring into the bowl. His butter and sugar is already well-combined, he should have added eggs already, whisking them by hand the old-fashioned way. “About this.”

It always comes up when he bakes. He doesn’t protest vegetables simply because most of them come from the garden he and Rosethorn lovingly attend to. But baking is indulgent in and of itself, and sometimes that feels unforgivable. 

“You can’t control this,” Tris says finally. “You survived, Briar. You’re a real boy now; you made yourself.”

“I got lucky,” he says. 

Sometimes she wants to shake him. They are all survivors of something broken; that’s how they even ended up with Rosethorn and Lark. “Then start a new channel. Tell them how to make something from nothing.”

“Can I do that?” Briar asks. 

“I’ll run the blog,” Tris promises. Briar’s face looks empty, echoing the face she saw in her own mirror after Aymery. She has to do something, and in a way, it’s soothing for her, too, to sit in the kitchen and watch Briar work. 

“I’ll think about it,” Briar says. 

It’s not a no.

[ _“Anyway, it’s time for the eggs now.”_

_“What Briar here isn’t telling you is that he spaced out. It’s been time for the eggs for the last five minutes.”_

_“Tris!”_

_“It’s true. Careful with the eggs, Briar.”_

_“Anyway, now that the eggs have been cracked, we mix everything together. This is also the stage where I like to add spices, which of course depends on taste.”_

_“Briar’s going to use powdered cinnamon here, but the mortar and pestle to crush the cardamom and black pepper fresh, and he’s going to use the grater on his nutmeg.”_

_“We’re being very excessive, here. If you want to, you can use cinnamon or an all-spice mix. They’ll come out delicious either way. We’ve made these with just cinnamon before, but Daja likes them with all the spices, and she’s working on a huge project, so we’re going all out.”_

_“_ You’re _going all out,_ I’m _just supervising.”_

_“Aw, Coppercurls, don’t be like that.”]_

Tris still refuses to show herself in front of the camera. She still sticks to her hands and her voice, to the way she crafts the short paragraphs that introduce each of Briar’s recipes. She’s good at this like she is at the weather, but so many people don’t want to believe in her mathematical models, never mind that she studied under some of the best. She’s good at storms, but she’s still too delicate to be a stormchaser. She stays close to home now, and doesn’t let anyone look at her face. She knows what she is; she’ll never be pretty or striking or beautiful like the people she lives with, but her mind is sharp as a tack and she wields her words with precision. 

Briar is gleeful today, which always means he’s up to something terrible. Sometimes his something terrible is teaching Little Bear to find every mud puddle while he weeds the garden that he and Rosethorn love so much. Sometimes his something terrible is teaching her how to pick locks, because it’s a useful skill. 

“Why do you look like that?” Tris asks. She has a book on weather patterns and a notebook in front of her. She’s working on another mathematical model, this one tracking hurricanes, trying to see how well she can predict their appearance. She may not be able to follow the storm in a piece of junk filled with equipment held together with duct tape and prayers, but she can still chase them in models. It's a new life's work, but she's not sure she likes this new life yet. Everything is so quiet.

“I’m going to teach you to make sugar cookies,” Briar says. His grin is entirely disreputable, and she wants to say no, but she still remembers his face when they were filming last week. Sugar cookies are about as indulgent as it gets, between the butter and the sugar, the icing and decorating. 

“Why sugar cookies?” Tris asks, putting her pen down. 

Briar’s grin is four degrees off of manic; he knows he has her. “I bought weather-themed cookie cutters. There are lightning bolts.”

They don’t look anything like real lightning bolts, but it’s the thought that counts and she is charmed, despite herself. Like Rosethorn, Briar is sweet even when he violently denies it. “I’m not getting on camera.”

“Of course not,” Briar says, like the thought never crossed his mind. “But you’ll learn.”

Later, when they’re mixing icing into different colours and arguing about whether Tris can make her lightning bolts blue, Briar asks her if she can start that blog for him. It reminds her of all the other times he asked for things he really wanted: reading, gardening, following Rosethorn to all her conferences, days on the roof they weren’t supposed to climb onto. She reminds him that she already said yes, but the irritation isn’t there, and she’s relieved that Briar cuts it out of the final video, which she watches as she works through a plate of pale blue lightning bolts and fluffy white clouds with smiley faces.

[ _“Everyone knows the most fun part of sugar cookies is decorating them.”_

_“I never did.”_

_“Neither did I, till I started baking. Remember my first efforts.”_

_“Briar, they were so bad. I think we have pictures somewhere.”_

_“Anyway, since we’re making weather shapes for Tris, because she’s a genius even if no one wants to admit that she’s smarter than all of them--”_

_“Briar, shut up!”_

_“It’s true. So we’re making lightning bolts and clouds and suns and Tris is going to realistically colour them because they’re her cookies and she can do whatever she wants and I am going to give every single cloud a happy face, because I can.”_ ]

2.

Tris can’t stop laughing at Briar. He’s restarted the video three times because he wants these things to be perfect for Rosethorn, and this is one of the few times that she’s away at a conference and he isn’t accompanying her. She and Sandry and Daja, although mostly Sandry. more stubborn than a mule, have drilled the importance of birthday surprises into him, so this is pretty much the only time he can try out recipes before she’s back. And because it’s Rosethorn, and because he cares, he wants to do something with roses, but he’s been moaning about how terrible recipes with roses really are. She’s even looked up things for him, but she’s not sure they actually helped much. 

“What are you trying?” she asks, placing a bookmark on her book. She has a feeling she’s going to be dragged into helping whether she likes it or not, and she’s far beyond the days where she was terrified of Rosethorn. 

Briar sighs. “Rosewater macarons, meringues, and a cake with rose petal jam and buttercream.”

“Ambitious, aren’t you?” Tris asks, eyebrows raised. 

“It’s Rosethorn,” Briar says, like that explains everything, and well, it probably does. “Besides, I can’t even post these videos till after the party and that’s assuming they all come out all right.”

“You’re good at this,” Tris says calmly. “Start with the cake; you’ve made dozens of them and you can do it in your sleep, especially if the roses don’t come until after the baking.”

“But I already have everything out for meringue,” Briar says. 

Tris rolls her eyes. “If you’re okay with me staying out of frame and just providing hands, I can mix together your cake.”

“Would you?” Briar asks earnestly. “Even if it’s just measuring and sifting and mixing the dry stuff together?”

“I wouldn’t have offered otherwise,” Tris says, a little too sharp, but then again, she’s always been this way. She doesn’t want to be in the frame, doesn’t want strangers on the Internet seeing her and judging her, even though she’s okay with them hearing her. It’s different when they only hear her, but she wants to help Briar and she does care for Rosethorn and sometimes, it’s soothing to create something. She could mention any of those reasons, but Briar takes her agreement at face value and starts bringing her everything she needs to be able to get the cake ready, liquid ingredients on her left, dry ingredients on her right, and the large stainless steel bowl right in front of her. 

As she stirs everything in, all she can see is the twist of a tornado. Some days are easier than others; this isn't one of them. 

[ _“Coppercurls, you have to add the milk now, and switch with the flour.”_

_“Like this?”_

_“Exactly like that.”_

_“This isn’t so bad, it’s just pouring and stirring.”_

_“Right, but because it’s cake, you run the risk of overdoing it and then your cake is sad and not fluffy.”_

_“Briar.”_

_“I’m dead serious. Don’t overbeat your ingredients! Don’t underbeat them either! Those are both going to mess with your cake.”_

_“Can you take over on this? You’re making me nervous.”_

_“I mean, if you want to pipe meringue…”_

_“No thanks, I’ll pass."_ ]

The cake is three layers in the end, because Briar doesn’t do things by halves when it comes to Rosethorn. He’s piped roses all over the surface of it and then dusted the top with a little bit of icing sugar, and Rosethorn’s face when she sees it is a little bit thunderstruck. 

“Did you do this?” she asks Briar, and her eyes are soft even if her voice is harsh. Briar is clearly her favourite, but Tris doesn’t begrudge her that.

“Tris helped,” Briar admits. “Mostly with the cake; I did all the decorating. Happy Birthday.”

He hugs her tightly, and Rosethorn hugs back, a little stiffly, caught off-guard by Briar’s uncharacteristic display of genuine emotion. Lark looks like she’s trying not to laugh, and so does Daja, but Sandry’s face has that expression that screams that she thinks this is sweet. When the two of them separate, Rosethorn doesn’t offer Tris a hug, too, but the look she gives Tris makes it clear that she acknowledges the work that went into it. 

“Time to cut it,” Tris says, instead of imagining the response from Rosethorn. 

That gets everyone distracted, getting ready for photos and finding the knife with the ribbon wrapped around the handle for Rosethorn to cut the cake with. 

Still, Rosethorn finds her later. “You’re not bad at it,” her foster mother says, her eyes unusually serious. “Helping Briar.”

Tris shrugs. “I’m much more about the weather.” It’s not true, and not false, the type of suitably neutral thing that feels like the proper thing to say. It’s Rosethorn’s birthday, after all.

“You can do both,” Rosethorn says. 

Tris isn’t sure she even wants to do both. She remembers stirring the cake batter and seeing the way hurricanes form. She might not ever be over it, and isn't that something? It didn't love her, but she still loves it so much it hurts, loves it so much that there was almost extra salt in the batter, except that she wouldn't forgive herself, and neither would Briar.

3.

Tris is the one who suggests making a Trader dessert for Daja, seeing how Daja's been mentioning the Traders she sees on her apprenticeship with what Sandry sees as a type of homesickness. Briar goes into it knowing he won’t be able to get the recipe right. He takes his best guess at it, working through different flavours weeks at a time while Daia’s away at her apprenticeship. Tris tries her best to look up recipes, but she’s not familiar with Trader food, and Traders don’t share their secrets with outsiders. They even make Sandry come and help with the tasting, and even though she complains, it’s good for her and good for them, Briar and Tris listening to Sandry’s comments and coming up with their own suggestions on how to fix things, different ways of cooking down the fruit, different proportions, changing the spices used. 

Briar messes with the crust too, trying all the different things he can think of and all the different things that Tris looks up. He asks for Sandry and Tris’s opinions a lot. They settle on a crispier crust than they had originally expected, and they’re all settled to make as many variations as they can, eating tarts to taste them until they’ve had too much stickiness, all over their lips and fingers. They do end up picking a winner, though, after they've pureed so much fruit that she feels like she won't be able to eat jam for a month. Tris didn't see twisters while pureeing the fruit and it feels like a miracle, that the only thing she saw was the churning of jewel-coloured liquids, purples and oranges and reds.

"So this is the one?" Sandry asks, finally. 

"I think so," Briar says. "Will you stay for the video?"

"I have a commission to finish and mail out," Sandry says. "But I think I can manage that."

"Does that mean more fruit to puree?" Tris asks, tired. 

Briar comes around the table and rests his head against hers for a moment. "You don't have to help with this part. Just be your usual charming self; you have fans now."

Sandry snorts, but Tris knows he's right; she's seen the comments on the blog she runs, the one where Briar uses the simplest ingredients and tools and does what he can to make it easier for someone in a bind to feed themselves. "I'd rather have fans for my other skills."

"Sorry, Tris," Briar says, penitent even though it's not his fault.

He knows more than he should. She's cried with him, and she's told him, about chasing storms, about staring out into gale-force winds and driving into the quiet heart of it. She's told him about the break, too, about the way the thing she loved the most broke her. Sometimes her collarbone still hurts. Sometimes a storm comes and she has to go lie down, the pressure reminding her about all the damage she sustained to her head in the form of a fierce, aching migraine.

[ _“We’re making Daja a surprise!”_

“You’re _making Daja a surprise;_ I’m _reading, and Sandry’s here because you wanted a taste tester.”_

_“Okay, I’m making Daja a surprise, jeez, Coppercurls, no need to get so worked up.”_

_“You’re going to cut this out later, right?”_

_“Probably not.”_

_“Do you two always do this?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Anyway, before Tris decided to nitpick the semantics, I was going to say that we’re going to try to make fruit tartlets, which doesn’t sound hard compared to some of what I’ve made, except that we--I--am making them for Daja, which means that we’re going to try to get them close to the Trader style and probably fail.”_

_“That’s not very optimistic of you.”_

_“You’re our secret weapon and our best option for getting these right.”_

_“That’s so much pressure, Briar!”_

_“Too bad. Anyway, we’re going to start, like usual, with butter!”_ ]

4.

Sandry is not a kitchen person, not the way Tris and Briar are. She’s a great judge of good food, because she has the travel experience to back it up, but she’s not a kitchen person. Briar always tricks her into it, promising to let her braid rolls or weave lattices for pie, cajoling like he always does for all of them. Sandry always says she likes the mini-pies the most, because it means more weaving, even if it’s nothing like using any of the looms she keeps in her room. Tris is here because she’s always here, but unlike Sandry, who doesn’t mind being in the videos when Briar asks for it, Tris still refuses to step behind the camera. She refuses to be compared to Sandry. 

Briar is making pies small enough to fit in the palms of their hands today, using cherries because they all like cherry pies with the tiny lattices that look more fake than real. Sandry gets to work weaving together lattice for the tops, while Tris needles Briar and pits cherries for him, her fingers coming away red like blood. Sometimes her fingers are clumsy like Rosethorn's are clumsy, but Rosethorn's clumsiness comes from a sustained stroke, not from phantom pains of bones that don't quite remember that they're healed. Today, they're perfect, like nothing ever happened at all. 

Briar ends up focusing the camera on her hands, dripping juice from the cherries. "Nice, Tris."

"Please, you know my murder weapon of choice would be a natural disaster," Tris says, smiling, because this is easy, the cherries and Sandry and Briar in the kitchen, her fingers nimble. She still never feels as right as she does in a storm, but she broke her bones and they told her she needed to stop chasing storms, so she may never get that sense of rightness again. She's still not sure she's ready to retire. 

Briar snickers and Sandry laughs. "I keep meaning to ask if I can weave you something related to your last model."

"Pie not doing enough for you?" Tris asks, to distract from the way her heart leaps. Her siblings have always paid attention to her work, and their refusal to acknowledge that it's done keeps her going. For the longest time, it was only Briar who knew of her new path, knew that she was going to find a way to chase storms that didn't quite put her in the heart of them. 

Sandry laughs, unladylike to the core. "Tris! I was going to gift it to you but now I wonder if I even should."

"You can't do that," Briar says, her staunchest defender in this house. He'll stick up for her because she can't quite do it, and she's burning with gratefulness. 

[ _“Today’s video will feature my sister Sandry, who was bribed into this because I promised to let her make lattices and she loves making lattices.”_

_“I don’t just love lattices.”_

_“You only say yes to those videos, usually.”_

_“Shut up, Tris.”_

_“It’s okay, Sandry. Today we’re making hand-sized pies so that you can make all the lattice you want.”_

_“Isn’t it Briar’s job to say that?”_

_“Yes, but he was being slow about it.”_ ]

5.

Apparently Tris has learned from watching Briar cook all the time. He likes these biscuits that they make with honey and cinnamon, and she has her suspicions about why that is but it’ll be just the thing to make him, when he hasn’t been feeling too well. She hasn’t asked about what happened with that special botany project he’d been planning to pursue, although he mentions things around the edges that imply that they’d tried to poach him, forgetting that Rosethorn is his foster mother, not just the professor he works under. She willingly puts herself in the camera’s field for the first time since Briar started this, and she knows she’s doing this utterly unlike Briar, a little more snappy, delving a little more into research and alternate options. 

But they’re cookies and cookies are easy, especially these ones. She mixes the dry, adds the wet, shapes them and dips them in cinnamon sugar, and tries for calm narration. She still has to start over a lot, not willing to change the tone of Briar’s channel with her particular brand of sharpness. It’s all worth it for the way Briar’s face lights up when she brings him a plate of the cookies, warm from the oven, complete with a glass of cold milk.

“Thanks Coppercurls,” he says, and he sounds sincere in a way that he doesn’t always. 

“Don’t thank me just yet,” Tris says grimly. “I’ve also recorded the video for you to post.”

“Tris, I don’t know what to say,” Briar says, and he sounds a little bit lost, like the person he was when he first came here, not expecting anyone to care and angrier than the whole damn world.

“A thank you will work just fine,” Tris says primly, sounding, for a moment, almost exactly like Sandry.

[ _“Briar’s been having a rough week, so I’m taking over just this once. He likes cinnamon and honey cookies with extra cinnamon, and luckily for us, this is an easy recipe. Remember, when measuring flour, it helps to not pack the flour together. If you want to do it right, rather than relying on different methods to aerate the flour, weigh the amount you’re using instead. It’s a surefire way to make sure you don’t use too much flour. Briar didn’t used to do it at first, but he learned after a round of too-dense cakes that didn’t taste bad, but didn’t have the right texture.”]_

“Hey Coppercurls?” Briar asks softly.

“What?” Tris snaps. She’s exhausted and just about ready to stumble up the stairs to sleep.

“You’re good at this,” Briar says, tapping the screen where he’s apparently been watching the video of Tris making his favourite cookies.

Tris knows she’s flushing unattractively, but for all that Briar is a natural flirt, that was said quietly, honestly, like he really meant it. “You’re still the baking vlog star in this household,” she says gruffly. 

“You sound like Rosethorn, you know,” Briar says. She can feel the unspoken comment about all bark and no bite, but it doesn’t make her upset, not when she knows that Briar’s using it as a compliment. “Can I at least ask you to help more often? On screen? You’d be better with a books vlog or talking about your research, but you’d be good at it, Tris.”

Tris tugs on one of her loose curls the way Briar is so fond of doing and considers it, really considers it. He's not just asking her about his videos. It's never just been about his videos. “I’ll appear in one of your videos a month, but you have to help me set up an account for books. Maybe my research, but the books first”

“Deal,” Briar says, immediately.

[ _“Breaking news, everyone! Tris is getting her own channel where she talks about books.”_

_“I’m still going to help here, Briar.”_

_“Well, yeah, but that’s not as important as your brand new channel. Anyway, now we can tell you that these cupcakes aren’t ordinary cupcakes! They’re actually celebratory cupcakes because Tris is launching her own channel.”_

_“And these cupcakes need to be put into the baking trays.”_

_“We use silpat because it reduces cleanup, although Tris finds washing dishes soothing.”_

_“Housework is soothing, Briar. Anyway, it’s cupcake time.”_

_“Bossy, Coppercurls. Anyway, if you’re not using silpat, you’re better off greasing and flouring, unless, of course, you’re using paper liners.”_

_“Of course I’m bossy. I learned it here, didn’t I?”]_

* * *


End file.
